I sure hope this chip can handle hd audio and hd video. It would make for a really nice mini pc to hook up to the home theater. I like the idea of having a low power/low noise cheap pc that I can hook up to my home theater. Its the perfect music player, ALL-format video player, and free unrestricted DVR. Reply

really wanting some more monopoly issues for the collection. Are they afraid their chipset market share drops from ~90% to about 70% because of nvidia? they simply cannot allow competition. Sad policy for a company that doesn´t need more money. Tha´s why this world is drowning in it´s own shortsightness. Reply

Hasn't everything stated in this article been known for at least 6 months now? I looked at the article title and anticipated architectural details on how the cpu has been improved or what the integrated graphics would be like, availability date, early benchmarks, or something else worthy of attention. But the article doesn't seem to say anything more than that it will have integrated graphics and memory controller, which is old old news. Reply

Manufacturing-only of x86-processors designed by others
IBM (manufactures processors for ZF Micro and VIA; discontinued production for NexGen and Transmeta)
TSMC (manufactures processors for VIA; discontinued production for Transmeta)
UMC (manufactures processors for Nvidia; discontinued production for Rise, SiS, ALi and ULi)
Fujitsu (manufactured processors for Transmeta; discontinued x86 production)
National Semiconductor (manufactured processors for ZF Micro; discontinued x86 production)

Manufacturing and selling under its own name of x86-processors designed by others
IBM (designs by Cyrix; now this line is discontinued)
SGS-Thomson (designs by Cyrix; discontinued x86 production)
Texas Instruments (designs by Cyrix; discontinued x86 production)

I just see too many loose ends here. Nvidia just need to tak ethe right step. Like after Intel being slapped with monopolists processes. Japan, Korea, now Europe. Just wait until somebody in the US start ticking.

I honestly can see Nvidia doing a x86. No problem. And i believe they have the personel to do it. Reply

What you need to state is whether this chipset supports SATA. If not, this isn't going to be a great desktop chipset. Or, perhaps it will depending on the south bridge, in which case, nVidia could still plug in anyhow via an ION without a memory controller. Reply

It's hard to see nVidia bothering to produce an IGP for Pineview. The DMI link is meant to attach a southbridge and is relatively low bandwidth being equivalent of a PCIe 1.1 x4 bus. An nVidia IGP would no doubt saturate the bus, especially if it has to go through DMI to access the on-CPU memory controller.

This is actually going to be an increasing problem since mainstream Nehalem like Lynnfield don't include CSI and only have DMI which will make it difficult for nVidia to make IGPs even if they figure out their chipset licensing issue with Intel. Future chipsets will largely be relegated to southbridges, which isn't exactly glamourous or allow much product differentiation for nVidia.

A compromise might be a southbridge with an IGP and it's own memory controller for a small amount of dedicated graphics memory like AMD's Sideport. That would of course increase cost and require more board room for those memory chips even if they are soldered on the motherboard rather than slotted. Reply

It might be in the graphic, but previously it was mentioned it would not be there.

Even though it is in the picture, I want confirmation. They wanted to leave SATA out since it takes more power, and they were wanting to make this particular Atom more of a MID chip, and not a desktop chip. Reply

Actually, this is very interesting. After all of the "you can only integrate the memory controller once" and "it locks you into a specific memory type" talk from Intel back in the Athlon 64 era, now they're taking that route with their ultra low power CPU/platform.

Also interesting to note that this basically kills off much of the market for stuff like, oh, I dunno... maybe NVIDIA Ion? That's pretty brutal, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Now NVIDIA is cut out of the Intel desktop chipset business, more or less, since they can't make DMI compatible chipsets (to my knowledge they don't have rights to do so), and Intel is doing the same with Atom. NVIDIA better hope AMD sticks around is all I can say! Reply

Overall I like this change. The chipset Intel has used has been the weakest link in the Intel platform. Too bad the new design shuts out other chipsets.... but there's always AMD to be needing chipsets! Reply